My apologies if this is in a weird forum, I couldn't find a "telephony/telecomm" forum to post this in.

Two nights ago, we had an internet/phone outage caused by a "DS3 problem" from our service provider. When everything came back up, I have 3 lines that won't handle any data communication.

One line is for a dedicated credit card machine.

The other two are for our alarm dialer. Basically what it does is if there are any problems(fire, burglary, problem with connection), it dials out to the police to record the problem.

If I place the credit card machine on the fax line, it goes through. So, I know the machine still works. I can also place a phone on all three lines and call my cell phone and have my cell phone call that line and the phone rings. The lines aren't noisy or full of static to the ear. However, both devices(credit card machine and dialer) come back with a "communication error" when trying to dial out. I know this is different from something being unplugged because they will both return a "no line" error if it is unplugged.

I've been on the phone with the phone company off and on now for probably 5-6 hours now. They're at a total loss. At this point, they don't even have any ideas to even try, other than replacing a "voice card" at their end and he has to get a manager's approval for that. Meanwhile, if we had a fire or burglary after hours, the police would never know about it and insurance claims could get messy. Not to mention, we have a $90,000 sale we're trying to push through the credit card machine and taking the fax machine offline every time we need to do a transaction is causing some....office drama.

So, when all else fails, turn to the community, right? I'm hoping someone out there with phone line experience can help out. How can voice be okay, but data not be? The phone company has already tried every setting they can think of on their end.

My first guess would be to have the phone company replace the card on their end. We had the opposite problem, we had data, but no voice. It turned out to be a problem in the switching at the phone company. There are lots of different tests they can run on-line to pinpoint the issue. I would bet money on it that the phone company is at fault here. Good luck.

My first guess would be to have the phone company replace the card on their end. We had the opposite problem, we had data, but no voice. It turned out to be a problem in the switching at the phone company. There are lots of different tests they can run on-line to pinpoint the issue. I would bet money on it that the phone company is at fault here. Good luck.

Dial the speed of the fax and CC machine back to 9600 baud if necessary.

Also, is this going through an IAD or PBX? Might have a problem there.

Well, the fax machine is working fine on another line(the one that the credit card machine worked fine on as well). As for the alarm dialer, I don't believe the baud rate can be modified, According to the manual, anyway: http://www.firelite.com/manuals/15465.pdf

Mark4517 wrote:

My first guess would be to have the phone company replace the card on their end. We had the opposite problem, we had data, but no voice. It turned out to be a problem in the switching at the phone company. There are lots of different tests they can run on-line to pinpoint the issue. I would bet money on it that the phone company is at fault here. Good luck.

Did you have this problem with only a few lines or was it all lines? That's what's stumping the phone company. If it was a bad switch/card, it should be affecting everything.

We have had some similar issues here also with CNG tones across our carriers network to the PSTN. In our situation our data and voice were bonded in the edge router. For some reason they had compression set on our fax/credit card lines. They were able to uncompress based on ANI (i think) and this solved our problems.

Of course I am sure we have a different set up with voice and data just throwing it out there. Good Luck!

Dial the speed of the fax and CC machine back to 9600 baud if necessary.

Also, is this going through an IAD or PBX? Might have a problem there.

Well, the fax machine is working fine on another line(the one that the credit card machine worked fine on as well). As for the alarm dialer, I don't believe the baud rate can be modified, According to the manual, anyway: http://www.firelite.com/manuals/15465.pdf

Mark4517 wrote:

My first guess would be to have the phone company replace the card on their end. We had the opposite problem, we had data, but no voice. It turned out to be a problem in the switching at the phone company. There are lots of different tests they can run on-line to pinpoint the issue. I would bet money on it that the phone company is at fault here. Good luck.

Did you have this problem with only a few lines or was it all lines? That's what's stumping the phone company. If it was a bad switch/card, it should be affecting everything.

It affected only the lines that were on that particular digital card. Do you have punch downs in your building?

We have two NEC Electra Elite 192's that have cards that can hold 8 internal lines per card. However, these particular lines in question bypass our PBX system and go straight to a punch block provided by the phone company.

Ok, then I would get the whole thing elevated within the phone company. The problem is definetly on their end. Unless someone messed with the Demark (highly unlikely) or tapped into the lines down the street from you (had that one happen) it is the phone companies problem. Get them to elevate the issue, and to send someone out to your location ASAP. Best of luck.

I presume when you unleash your CC machine, it is able to successfully dial and be answered - and at some point beyond that, things hose up.

If the claim is accurate about a DS3 that popped, and not having any other theory... perhaps this theory might be useful: They mitigated the outage by moving you from that dead TDM circuit to a trunk that is IP based.

IP based transports often won't play well with modems (or faxes). If that's the case, then either they need to move you back to TDM, or pursue the advice that WhataGimic suggested (compression / sample rate / codec).

You won't hear any issues when checking on a princess phone, obviously, because modems (faxes) use FSK... which oh-so-loves the "most of it will show up when it eventually gets there" nature of IP based transports. About your only local mitigation would be to use not use FSK - e.g. set it for 300 or 1200 baud, light some candles, and sacrifice a coworker.

I presume when you unleash your CC machine, it is able to successfully dial and be answered - and at some point beyond that, things hose up.

If the claim is accurate about a DS3 that popped, and not having any other theory... perhaps this theory might be useful: They mitigated the outage by moving you from that dead TDM circuit to a trunk that is IP based.

IP based transports often won't play well with modems (or faxes). If that's the case, then either they need to move you back to TDM, or pursue the advice that WhataGimic suggested (compression / sample rate / codec).

You won't hear any issues when checking on a princess phone, obviously, because modems (faxes) use FSK... which oh-so-loves the "most of it will show up when it eventually gets there" nature of IP based transports. About your only local mitigation would be to use not use FSK - e.g. set it for 300 or 1200 baud, light some candles, and sacrifice a coworker.

Most of that flew right over my head, but it definitely sounds plausible.

He called me back a little while ago saying that he's put in a service request to "reset the card" tonight after hours. Just in case it doesn't come back up, they'll have time to troubleshoot with minimal impact to us and everyone else on that card.

I'll verify with him that we are still on a TDM circuit the next time I speak with him.

Unfortunately, even if I could get the credit card machine to lower its baud rate and sacrifice a coworker(I have one picked out already), there is no way to set the baud rate on the alarm dialer. We definitely need a "real" fix here, not a workaround.

Thank you for your feedback. I will update this as soon as I have more information.

Sounds to me like something changed in how they're providing the POTS lines after the DS3 outage. No news there. They need to fix it. The DS3's configuration is out of your hands. If compression is enabled on that port now, and it wasn't, or if they switched you to a IP based multiplexer it is also out of your hands. They need to figure out what they changed and change it back.

I would in the meantime ask your merchant processor if they have an internet based terminal they can send you, because fighting for the fax line isn't a long term workaround.

I'm surprised your alarm system doesn't have a cellular failover line, I thought that was pretty standard issue.

I'm surprised your alarm system doesn't have a cellular failover line, I thought that was pretty standard issue.

The Fire Marshall for Maricopa County here in Phoenix hasn't approved cellular as a "standard" yet. My company installs fire alarm systems and even though we've had the fire marshall out here to take a look at all the cellular systems we've been testing, they're still not sold on their reliability. Almost none of our field techs are sold on them, either.

Last night we set one up in hopes that if something did happen, we'd be covered on insurance issues. I'm still not going to tell the phone company that, though. It's our only trump card right now.

I'd expect cellular to be horrid based on overbooking and if the cell site's power fails (and especially both if there's a larger scale event / disaster) - what seems to be the on-going issues you've encountered with it?

He probably spent the first hour doing everything I've already done: Figuring out which lines aren't working properly and if they share the line with something else. I had all this documented, but they had to see for themselves. I guess I can understand that. If a user told me they checked the power button on the monitor, I'd probably still check it to be sure.

The next hour, they hooked a laptop modem up to one of the lines and tried to communicate with a modem back at their office. Unfortunately, and this happens often I've noticed, the guy that was here has 42 years of experience with copper, but barely knows how to turn his laptop on. Sigh.

We are finally back up and running after more than a week. After being escalated twice(the second time we called our sales rep, who was by far more motivated to get us back up and running), they finally switched a card out on their end.

It was really driving me nuts because it felt like they were implying I was lying to them the whole time. Like I don't have better things to do than make up fake problems and get backed up on the rest of my work.

Anyway, it was hard to pick the best answer and helpful posts, but thank you all for the advice and suggestions!